Huppert is an actress of great depth, so playing a monster in the shallow end of the pool is no great accomplishment. But she is great at staring with piercing intent. And she knows how to make a scene.

There are moments where director Bell seems to be positioning Esther as an anti-hero, which would have been interesting. But it’s not a path to which he commits, and it’s back to bloody business as usual. The fact that this is a prequel drains even more suspense from the movie’s resolution.

At its most basic level, Becky is a female empowerment/revenge movie. And a movie like this, with its de rigueur open-ended sequel-friendly ending, suggests Becky has plenty more empowerment left in her.

This dark comedy, co-produced and directed by Elizabeth Banks, is a non-stop ride. Complete with gore, sick humour and characters (including the bear) that quickly attach themselves to the audience, this film satisfies so many low-end viewing pleasures that it’s a film you want to see again just to confirm that yes, that WAS indeed what you just saw.

Despite some interesting action scenes, the movie is far too long at two hours and 40 minutes. Worse yet, you’re always aware that you’re watching a movie.

The parts of The Little Things that are good aren’t original, and the parts that are original aren’t good.

A decent, fast-moving nod to the spirit that originally made the Terminator movies a permanent part of pop culture.

It’s possible to leave the theatre unaffected only to look back at Empire of Light with affection. And it’s the movie’s ability to linger unnoticed until surfacing with a revised and unexpected understanding that is at the heart of movie magic.

Silent Night is not the second coming of Die Hard that we might have hoped.

The obvious thing to call this film is a social satire. The humour is dry, pointed and often very, very funny. But Jarmusch is too clever and too careful a filmmaker to simply toss off a genre film for a few laughs.

Director Nick Moran gets the temperature of the era mostly right, and effectively weaves this extraordinary source material into a watchable if formulaic two hours.

Ava DuVernay’s beautiful and visually imaginative A Wrinkle In Time is a magical mystery tour for teenage girls. It’s a female empowerment movie that says love triumphs over evil and light trumps darkness. It says that the many teenage girls who believe they’re not good enough can find their strength and beauty, even through their flaws.

The Beekeeper is mindless, overblown nonsense timed perfectly to drag us from a haze of prestige films and an awards bait stupor.

The problem is the execution. As directed by Justin Baldoni (who also stars as the husband), the film feels lacklustre and slapdash, never doing anything to rise above the basic storytelling beats.

The film can be over-wrought, manipulative, and by some standards, unfairly stages death as a backdrop for parading a rogue-gallery of family archetypes. And though I recognize the film’s flaws, I choose to let my cynicism slide.

Anemone is a redemptive tale, but slow and dark and haunting, sometimes slipping into fantasy and playing out like a fairytale, and sometimes unfolding like a Greek tragedy. As films go, it’s a triumph.

Harlin has had a long and uneven career leading up to this. Though he isn’t quite old enough to have tackled Deep Water back in 1979, he did make Cliffhanger and Die Hard 2 in the 1990s, and this feels like a kind of spiritual successor to those star-driven action movies.

Alita: Battle Angel is about a sweet but lethally trained hybrid girl. Fittingly, it feels like a hybrid story, pulled together from bits and pieces of Young Adult and genre action films, and is less than the sum of its parts.

Esthetically perched somewhere between a low-budget TV biopic and a soap opera - with occasional flourishes of bonkers-cheesiness worthy of cult status - Aline is the Celine Dion hagiography no one could have dreamed up except its director.

To quote Bill Murray’s song again, “Star Wars/ those near and far wars” checks the boxes of a lot of the audience’s base, while seeming unburdened by real gravity.

Apparently intended as a gateway movie for future horror movie fans, Annabelle Comes Home is a sex-and-death-free haunted-house tale about adventures in demonic baby-sitting.

Though it’s a movie with an identity crisis, Rahim’s magnetic performance carries enough of The Mauritanian to make it a worthwhile watch.

The loss of two-dimensional artistry of the original has some compensation of human warmth.

And though you can sense the influences of Mad Max, Escape from New York, and even a few influential forces from Walter Hill’s The Warriors, The Forever Purge remains an uncinematic thriller unworthy of breaking a lengthy stay away from the theatre.

A slave-on-the-run movie that uses every bit of its star’s modest acting ability and ticks all the award boxes, Antoine Fuqua’s Emancipation would be a shoo-in in a world where Smith was not banned from the Oscars for 10 years.

It would help if you were a deep-dive fan, hungry for ephemera and eager to hear stuff Young has rarely, if ever, played for an audience.

With its screwy supernatural premise — buoyed by terrific cast that includes Anthony Mackie, Jennifer Coolidge, David Harbour and Tig Notaro — the movie is a charmer with heart.

Disney’s Lilo & Stitch is about a dangerous alien lifeform that escapes from its creators, arrives on a backward planet and charms the inhabitants. Which is not a bad metaphor for Disney itself. It continues to remake hand-drawn animated classics as bloated live-action spectacles, hoping a nostalgic moviegoing public will continue to greet them with open arms and wallets.